Atatürk Versus Erdogan: Turkey’s Long Struggle

Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister and now as President, Erdoğan has distanced himself from the secularism of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Photograph by Kayhan Ozer / Anadolu / Getty

Turkey has weathered five successful military coups since the founding of the Republic, in 1923, and what happened on Friday, with soldiers surging against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., marks an attempt at the sixth. Turkey is a constitutionally secular state, though one that is more than ninety-five per cent Muslim and which was once the seat of an Islamic empire. The Turkish military has often served as the nation’s firewall against encroachments on secularism and the Constitution, guarding the aspirations of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The tension between secularism and religious fundamentalism is as essential to understanding today’s Turkish political life as is the tension between federalism and states’ rights in America.

The last military coup, in 1997, was what the Turks call “a coup by letter.” The Turkish military leadership delivered a memorandum, which initiated a process that led to the resignation of the Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, of the Welfare Party, and caused the dissolution of his coalition government. Çevik Bir, one of the generals who planned the coup, stated his case with a metaphor any parent could understand: “In Turkey we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. . . . The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish Armed Forces is the doctor who saves the child. Depending on how sick the kid is we administer the necessary medicine to make sure the child recuperates.”

After 1997, Turkey swiftly swung secular. The late nineteen-nineties famously saw the persecution of women wearing headscarves in public places, a ban that had been originally implemented but loosely enforced by Atatürk in an effort to firmly establish a secular nation. After 1997, the Islamists became the outsiders, at least for a while. Their Welfare Party, which had been dissolved as part of that coup, was reborn as the Virtue Party, and with it was born a new breed of activist who stood for religious freedom and against the excesses of secularism. One of the leaders was the mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was later imprisoned, in 1999, for a speech he gave in Siirt, a town in the religiously conservative and restive southeastern part of the country. He was convicted of “inciting hatred based on religious differences,” for reciting the following verses by the poet and nationalist ideologist Ziya Gokalp:

Our minarets are our bayonets

Our domes are our helmets

Our mosques are our barracks.

We will put a final end to ethnic segregation.

No one can ever intimidate us. . . .

My reference is Islam. If I am not able to speak of this,

What is the use of living?

After a four-month prison term, Erdoğan was released. His ascendancy in Turkish political life was swift. In 2003, he was elected Prime Minister, coming to power as part of a backlash against secularism’s impingement on religious freedoms. He has long been unpopular among cosmopolitan and non-religious Turks, but he has always enjoyed staunch support among the rural and religiously conservative. This past November, his party won 49.5 per cent of the vote in nationwide parliamentary elections. However, as evidenced by this latest coup, a critical mass of the Turkish population has turned against him due to a list of grievances: his resumed war against the Kurds in the country’s southeast; his onetime support of Islamist rebels in Syria, which contributed to the rise of the Islamic State; his government’s crackdown on a free press and takeover of newspapers like Sabah; and, perhaps most significantly, his desire to hold a constitutional referendum on whether to grant him an executive Presidency with the power to change current laws around secularism.

The swing between Turkey’s constitutional secularism, on the one hand, and its religious identity, on the other, defined the founding of the Turkish Republic, which was orchestrated by military officers, most famously Atatürk. Those soldiers believed the religiously influenced Ottoman Empire had led to the nation’s demise in the aftermath of the First World War, during which Turkey had disastrously allied itself with the Central Powers and Germany to further the sultanate’s outsized imperial ambitions. Atatürk himself was a former regimental commander who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and was famously quoted as telling his troops, “I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die**.**”

Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister and now as President, Erdoğan has distanced himself from Atatürk. He views himself as the father of a new Turkish identity, one aligned more closely with its Ottoman past, its Islamic heritage. He has taken the country in a more religious direction, similar to a place it was in before the 1997 coup. Just before that coup, a poll conducted by the World Values Survey found that ninety-five per cent of Turks trusted their military. A Pew poll taken last year, in the run-up to national elections, found that only fifty-two per cent of Turks gave the military a positive rating. With support for the military less dominant now and with Erdoğan’s support still solid among much of the population, the coup has faltered. Citizens have taken to the streets in protest. Opposition parties have also chosen to stand in solidarity with the government. The Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which mainly represents the country’s Kurdish minority, sent out a mailer against the coup: “The only solution is democratic politics!”

Framed portraits of Atatürk still line Cevdet Paşa Caddesi, the main thoroughfare along the Bosphorus, in Istanbul. It seems unlikely that the Statue of the Republic with him at its center will be removed from Taksim Square anytime soon. Atatürk’s legacy and longevity seem to extend without question. He was the one who advised, “He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science.”

Elliot Ackerman is a writer based in Istanbul. He is the author of the novel “Green on Blue.”